Shortening hardware maintenance and upgrade windows
By effectively planning hardware maintenance and upgrades, you can greatly reduce and even eliminate the impact of these activities to the availability of your system.
There are times when you need to perform routine maintenance on your hardware or increase the capacity of your hardware. These operations can be disruptive to your business.
If you are performing a system upgrade, be sure that you plan carefully before you begin. The more carefully you plan for your new system, the faster the upgrade will go.
Concurrent maintenance
Many hardware components on the system can be replaced, added, or removed concurrently while the system is operating. For example, the ability to hot plug is supported for Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) card slots, disk slots, redundant fans, and power supplies. Concurrent maintenance improves the availability of the system and allows you to perform certain upgrades, maintenance, or repairs without impacting the users of the system.
Capacity on Demand
With Capacity on Demand, you can activate additional processors and pay only for the new processing power as your needs grow. You can increase your processing capacity without disrupting any of your current operations.
Capacity on Demand is a feature that offers the capability to nondisruptively activate one or more central processors of your system. Capacity on Demand adds capacity in increments of one processor, up to the maximum number of standby processors built into your model. Capacity on Demand has significant value for installations where you want to upgrade without disruption.
Parent topic:
Shortening planned outages